


Pygmalion

by ancientreader



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pygmalion, magical au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 22:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9207173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: The spell to turn a statue into an animate being has been illegal in the UK for a hundred and seventy years when the -- body? -- is found on Hampstead Heath. It changes everything.





	1. Blood from a Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Frikshun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frikshun/gifts).



> [Frikshun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Frikshun/profile) prompted a story based on the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, and this is what happened. I disclaim all responsibility.
> 
> As usual, [TSylvestris](http://archiveofourown.org/users/TSylvestris/pseuds/TSylvestris) supplied her extraordinary ability to know exactly what a story needs and encourage me in fixing it. SO MANY thanks, Sylve!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Animatio,”_ Sherlock says, again in that tone John has never heard from him before; “and then, so to speak, its reversal.” There’s something almost tender in his expression, John decides: this might be what Sherlock looks like when he’s genuinely impressed.

The body — if “body” is the right word — lies on the wooden walkway along the Ladies’ Bathing Pond in Hampstead Heath; in this exceptionally raw late December, it might have been there for days. The solitary walker who spotted it is sat leaning against the wall of the changing room, her knees drawn up to her chin. She looks bewildered — as well she might, for no one there, not even Sherlock, has seen anything like this before.

Perhaps Molly will be able to work out an approximate date of death (death?) from whatever insect life has established itself in the dried blood. And no doubt Sherlock has conducted experiments concerning the deterioration of all manner of fabric under all manner of weather. But the — body — of course has not decomposed at all, or not to any extent measurable on a human scale. It will crumble eventually: in geologic time.

Sherlock, who has been staring at it _,_ rapt, for a solid half minute, now draws in a breath and sends it out again on an exclamation: “Extraordinary!” The sullenness of earlier that morning has vanished.

 _Body._ Even if you withheld that word, who could withhold the pity that inheres in “victim”? Her clothes have been nearly torn off. Dried blood has drenched much of a twenty-foot stretch of the walkway; no doubt there are defensive wounds on the palms and the forearms. . . . No, the _marks_ of defensive wounds. She fled here, here the — killer? — caught up with her, and here the struggle concluded, leaving a nearly naked figure, face stilled in pain and terror, hands disposed not quite symmetrically at her clavicles, frozen where they fell away from her slashed throat or perhaps were reaching back to clutch at the wound. Her dried dying blood is smeared brown over the marble of her breasts and belly. The marble, being porous, will have stained. Her right hand is caught in the air, no more than an inch above what was once her flesh. It must have spasmed at the moment of death, when she reverted to the stone she had begun as.

“ _Animatio,_ ” Sherlock says, again in that tone John has never heard from him before; “and then, so to speak, its reversal.” There’s something almost tender in his expression, John decides: this might be what Sherlock looks like when he’s genuinely impressed.

“Is it murder, legally?” John asks Lestrade, who puts his hands up for “Who knows?”

“The CPS are trying to work that out. For my money — ” The DI shrugs. “Looks like she suffered enough, didn’t she? For it to count for something.”

*

Animatio has been illegal for a hundred and seventy years. “It is no more,” William Wilberforce had said, “than a means to create slaves from stone when flesh and blood are free,” and the aftermath of human slavery’s abolition proved him, posthumously, right. Animate servants were something of a fad, for a time, till in 1845 public revulsion put an end to the making of more; the last one had — died — in 1886. You could go, if you liked, to the warehouse in Nottinghamshire that sheltered all their remains, piled willy-nilly like rubble, which of course they were. From time to time someone tried to gin up a movement to repurpose them for builders’ stone.

*

“We have a prosecution for using Animatio, anyhow,” says Lestrade, “assuming we can find the practitioner who did it. And meanwhile, we’re investigating this as a murder, so if the prosecutors decide it is one, we can make the case.”

Sherlock has been frowning at the DI throughout this speech. “Practitioner? You’re not looking for a practitioner, for God’s sake. You’re looking for a sculptor.”

All present stare at him, eliciting the inevitable sigh and eye-roll.

“To cast Animatio,” Sherlock says, sounding personally offended by the information, “is not difficult. Yes, yes: the creation of life or at least its semblance” — a barely audible pause here — “weightiest implications of magical practice; humility in the face of same, et cetera. But the spell depends on the identical principles, somewhat elaborated, as the basic spell for establishing an electrical charge that is taught in secondary school physics. It’s _easy._ How does none of you know this?”

Silence.

“ _But”_ — Sherlock is visibly gritting his teeth now — “while the magic here isn’t much to speak of, the quality of that sculpture is. It’s the sculptor you want. Look.” He holds his phone up to Lestrade and John; the display shows a daguerreotype of a human face, but — no, it isn’t a human face, it’s the face of an animate, and John feels himself shrink away from it. Lestrade, too, flinches minutely.

The face has eyes, a nose, a mouth; they are in the correct relation to one another, more or less; the eyes look out, the mouth must have been able to serve for the ingestion of food and drink, and, presumably, for speech; but the whole is all wrong. Human and not. Slapdash.

“Bang in the Uncanny Valley, yes?” Sherlock says. “There were better ones, of course, but the overall standard was not high.”

“But — ”

John knows exactly what Lestrade is thinking — it’s what he’s thinking too: _But the ones in our textbooks,_ for of course every secondary school history text had its three or four paragraphs about the animates, illustrated with a photograph of one such unfortunate and concluding with two lines about the abolition that invariably included the phrase “public revulsion.” The animate in the photograph was never exactly good-looking. But also was never ... _this._

“It wasn’t public revulsion to their servitude at all, was it?” John says.

“No,” Sherlock replies. And, scornfully: “I’m astonished that you ever believed such tripe. It was public revulsion toward _them_ , of course.”

As one, they turn toward the enmarbled animate again. “This,” Sherlock says, “is the product of meticulous labor. One is tempted to call it passionate. The same, of course, could be said of the slashed throat. Passionate, I mean; you certainly couldn’t call a knife to the throat ‘meticulous.’”

“If they died suddenly, like this one,” Sally Donovan says, unexpectedly, “they turned all at once, right? But if they died slowly, like of a disease, did it — creep up on them? Part of them stone and part of them not?”

No one answers this.

John has a question, too, one that seems at once stupid and vital: “Where will she go?”

Sherlock’s face is empty but for the hint of a sneer — at him or at the thought of the animate as “she,” John can’t tell. Both, perhaps. “It’ll go to the morgue, obviously. Molly will want to test the blood least contaminated by these surroundings, and that’s the blood on the animate itself.”

 _“It,”_ John says, not under his breath; Sherlock shrugs.

Everyone present picks up on the moment. Lestrade frowns and shoves his hands into his pockets. Donovan looks at John, sharply, then looks away, flattening her expression to nothing because, after all, she does like John enough to think he can do better than Sherlock.

Anderson smirks and doesn’t try to hide it.

John, perversely, wants to defend Sherlock, and next is angry at himself; and after that he just feels strange and alone, as he has more and more often of late.

*

The thing is, John’s heart had lit up in the first moment at Barts, when Sherlock had done no more than glance up from his spellwork to say hello.

The spell he was working on, John could see, was in the last stages of development but had not quite cohered, so that its components were still individually discernible: Elucidare, in the form appropriate for nonverbal information, and Amplificare, in the emphatic form used for faint signals, again nonverbal. These were overlaid on the character that meant “past,” while over them in turn a double helix hovered, shimmering.

John was looking at an elegant spell to make legible traces of DNA that had degraded seemingly beyond hope of recovery. That was a feat in itself — but more astonishing yet was the spell’s structure, for it directly incorporated mundane science. Such a thing should have been impossible. He knew what expression of amazement he must have worn.

The practitioner occupied in inventing the impossible spell had eyes the color of cloud and moonlight, and a mouth that needed John to bite it. His shirt, John wanted to say, could not have been fitted so closely by merely physical tailoring.

Sherlock’s attention on John was, like Sherlock’s attention on spellwork, or an autopsy, or mundane or magical crime, absolute; John, anyway, was already enthralled. Sherlock seemed as inevitable as rain or hunger. They had become lovers that night, and only a week later John had moved in with Sherlock, to the flat in Baker Street. Was this too precipitate? Perhaps it was: for, a year later, John has found himself invaded by unease.

*

The disguises, the feints, the sob stories, the misdirections and the plausible smiles: they were the trouble. John felt always on him the chill of _not knowing_ , ever since it first occurred to him that perhaps, perhaps, just as Sherlock offered clients and witnesses a series of false selves, so might the self Sherlock offered him, John, be shammed. The Sherlock above him in bed, in evening half-light sent fluttering by their bedroom curtains, pressing his mouth against John’s neck: that Sherlock, was he real? Sherlock had a hundred or a thousand lying smiles; what of the one he gave John, the sweet small joyful one: could John repose his heart against that joy, would it give way to genuine contempt? When John wasn’t there to look at Sherlock and to hear, what expression did Sherlock’s face wear then, what did he say?

And what of those seemingly unguarded moments like the one at the Ladies’ Bathing Pond, the moments when Sherlock, looking at the remains of what had once been alive and had suffered, could say “it”?

It was impossible to know what satisfaction Sherlock might gain from feigning to love John — who, after all, knew himself to be an ordinary physician, of modest magic, with a body rather scarred and plain, intelligent enough as long as no comparisons were made with that restless and beautiful genius. But what John couldn’t know he could guess; he could guess that, if the Sherlock who smiled and kissed him was as false as all the others, then perhaps it simply amused him to have a living toy.

*

Everyone on Lestrade’s team seems perturbed and unhappy about the case, so it doesn’t seem likely that any of them would help turn it to tabloid fodder, but someone somewhere at the Met must have a friend at the _Daily Mail:_ the headline the next day reads “WAS SHE REALLY ALIVE — _OR JUST UNDEAD_?” — superimposed, naturally, on a photograph of the animate’s contorted face. The Director of Public Prosecutions holds a press conference at which she announces that what she calls the “shocking event” will be treated as a homicide. The same day’s evening newscasts lead with video of the sculptor Andreas Coburne turning himself in.

*

Aspects of Animatio had never been well understood, and never would be, since no one can legally cast the spell. Why, for example, did even badly sculpted animates have the usual distribution of body and head hair? Why did they appear to have the full complement of human internal organs? “Appear to,” because, as recent scholarship has pointed out, no one had ever performed surgery on an animate; animates could not be autopsied, and as no animates now existed, modern imaging technologies had never been brought to bear. The fact remained that animates ingested food and produced excreta (but what happened in between?); that a stethoscope — or an ear — laid against an animate’s chest picked up what sounded like a heartbeat, and that what felt like pulses appeared on an animate’s body exactly where a human pulse would appear.

If the skin of an animate was cut or punctured, the animate bled, as the animate killed at the Ladies’ Bathing Pond had bled. Circulatory system human-like, then?

Animates might run fevers. They sustained injuries and healed from them. They got sick; they got better, or they didn’t. An animate that partook of spirits would behave as if drunk.

Animates had been known to weep.

*

Not a day goes by that John doesn’t think he ought to leave Sherlock. On mornings when he wakes alone in their bed he turns his face into Sherlock’s pillow and tells himself to cut his losses.

Sometimes Sherlock leaves a strand of his black twining hair on the pillow. John may pick it up and hold it between his hands. Sensation in the thumb and forefinger of his left hand is diminished, because of nerve damage from his mundane shoulder wound. Spell injuries are meant to be more difficult to recover from — no qualified medical practitioner had been able to do much about the persistent icy ache in John’s right thigh — but on the night of the day they met, as they lay learning each other on Sherlock’s wide bed, Sherlock laid his palm on the part of John’s thigh under which ran the obdurator nerve. A feeling of relaxation and well-being flowed out from Sherlock’s hand; when John tried to describe it to himself later, the closest he could come was the memory of a massage his medical school girlfriend had given him once when he was in that sweet balance of drunkenness that makes everyone seem like a friend and that doesn’t leave hangover behind. John’s mouth fell open and he caught Sherlock’s wrist; “Oh!,” he said. “God, you — how did you do that? _Thank you,_ ” and Sherlock, braced over John and parting John’s thighs to fuck him, had nevertheless managed to shrug — as though it was nothing. To heal a spell injury like that, just incidentally, as a by-effect of some other, and presumably absorbing, activity entirely. _What kind of practitioner_ are _you?_ John had thought, and didn’t ask: not meaning _beneficent_ or _maleficent_ but thinking, through his own distraction, that Sherlock must be something else entirely, a practitioner not just more powerful than others but of some different matter altogether.

*

Between patients at the clinic, John tells himself he ought to cut his losses. While he waits for whatever takeaway he is bringing home of a Friday night, he tells himself he ought to cut his losses. While he and Sherlock are fucking, John thinks _I’m nothing but a game to him, I’ve got to get myself out of here,_ but the thought doesn’t prevent him from crying out in shocked ecstasy. Sherlock comes, too; Sherlock also makes noises; but Sherlock’s face, when John steals a glance at it afterward, appears uninhabited.

*

The first shiver had come early on, the first false note struck. Barely perceptible, really . . . John had spoken sharply, that was it, annoyed by — nothing much: after an unexpectedly weary shift he had been longing, his whole way home, to sit at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, and milky tea steaming in front of him; he could taste the tea, could feel the ease of _no more obligations to fulfill today_ wash through him. But when he got home he found that Sherlock had left the milk out all day to spoil. _Dammit,_ he had begun, and in response Sherlock began blathering in comedic-lofty vein about the utility of milk-spoilage chronologies in estimating how long a flat had been empty, supposing the tenant had embezzled vast sums from the charitable organization that employed her and then fled the UK . . . Sherlock kept up this stream of preposterousness for so long that John started to laugh, and put up his hands to signify _All right, then, you bastard._

But. Before Sherlock embarked on his line of patter, there had been a moment: Sherlock’s eyes widening, his lips pressed briefly together, a glance down. Regret and anxiety. It had touched John, that Sherlock should feel his irritation so keenly.

Two days later he saw the same eyes-widened, lips-pressed, glance-down pass over Sherlock’s face while he was lying to a suspect. _False, false, false,_ ran through John’s head, and he felt as if someone had drawn a needle through his heart.

There have been many such instances.

The bond John felt with Sherlock had formed so quickly and had felt so absolute. It was tangible in the air between them. John thought he had developed an extra sense, he imagined himself perceiving Sherlock with this sense in a way others did not, could not, perceive him. Sherlock was like a new color or like a sound outside the range of hearing. A taste never before known but now found to underlie all others. Sherlock was a perfume. His presence was like the touch of a finger that one feels over all of one’s skin, and that once known is desired ever after.

Now John doubts and doubts, yet the desire will not leave him. Daily he tells himself to cut his losses and go. He doesn’t go.

*

Sometimes John catches Sherlock looking puzzled. Perhaps hurt. Then he smooths his expression and turns away, so quickly that, if Sherlock were anyone else, John would think he didn’t want to be caught watching.

But what he believes now is that Sherlock arranges to be caught watching him. Or that the puzzlement is real but is only what anyone with a mildly interesting pet might feel, seeing the pet, for cryptic reasons, grow less amenable.

*

In the weeks after the discovery of the dead animate, John concludes that there’s no longer even any ambiguity. Sherlock’s bright smiles are gimcrack with the gloss peeling off; John can’t understand how even the dimmest client is fooled, and as for himself — how on earth had he fallen for such counterfeit? How had he set nothing of himself aside, why had he so recklessly given everything over, how had he not perceived the swindle?

Then he remembers that extraordinary, casual power: the moment when his leg injury simply . . . went away. He had thought it meant something to Sherlock too; but all it really signified, apparently, was its own offhandedness. _If it seems too good to be true . . ._

Always, Sherlock had been oblivious of John — of anyone — when busy with an experiment or drawn deep into a case, but now, if John manages to catch his attention at all, Sherlock will look up and watch him blankly for a while, then, just as blankly, turn away again, as if no one were there. Really, as if neither of them were there, it seems to John.

*

Coburne refuses legal counsel. He refuses to discuss his motives. He pleads guilty to casting Animatio and to manslaughter — it is felt that a charge of murder will not stick — and otherwise keeps silence until finally, pressed by the judge at sentencing, he makes this statement:

“The animate and I had quarreled. She ran away. I took a kitchen knife and pursued her until I caught her at the Ladies’ Bathing Pond, where I used the knife to slash her throat. I made no attempt to get help of any kind but only watched as she bled to death. Her name was Galatea.”

The sentence is fifteen and a half years — the odd six months is for casting Animatio. After a week even the _Daily Mail_ gives up trying to wring any further headlines from the case.

*

John finally moves out the day he loses his magic.

The catastrophe strings itself together like the life-undoing inverse of that trivially lucky throw everyone makes sometimes: the chewed-up pen cap ricochets off the end of the bookcase and onto the windowsill, whence it bounces onto the rim of the waste bin just so, and in. Nothing you could replicate, however long you tried.

John is laying Tranquilium for a patient who presents with migraine. In the form he’s using, Tranquilium downregulates production of the neurotransmitter triskaidekotonin, TKDT, high levels of which are implicated in migraine and normal levels of which mediate neocortical activity associated with the exercise of magic.

(Migraine sufferers, as a rule, have stronger-than-average magic; neurologists have been studying the phenomenon for decades now, hoping to uncouple magic from misery, and failing. Practitioners who, like Sherlock, display powerful magic and no evidence of migraine, are research gold. Sherlock has coldly ignored all John's urgings to enroll in a study.)

John has just spoken the last word of Tranquilium when he sneezes; reaching for a tissue, he strikes the hanging bell charmed to produce Reflectio, so the Tranquilium he just cast is turned back on himself. But John hasn’t got migraines and does have normal levels of TKDT; the spell brings an abrupt halt to the neurochemical interactions that govern his magic.

It should have been fine — the loss of his magic should have been temporary, the triskaidekotonin replenishing itself over the course of a week or two. It means a holiday; even in John’s startlement, part of his attention turns to that, a few days in Sicily perhaps, somewhere with olive groves and orange trees . . . He explains the difficulty to Ms. Walthamstow, opens the door of his consulting room to see her out and tell the receptionist she needs to see one of the other doctors, that same afternoon if at all possible, and, turned toward his patient as he walks, he smacks into the rolling cart a tech is pushing down the hall.

The cart is full of vials of newly compounded mundane medications and, also, potions. Among the potions is the inhalant everybody calls Superglue because it makes the effects of certain spells and potions permanent if administered within a few minutes of casting or ingestion. Superglue is normally transported in a padded sleeve, to prevent accidents exactly like the one about to happen to John, but someone was in a hurry, it seems. A vial falls off the cart and shatters on the floor.

Superglue is never, ever, ever used with any magic affecting brain function.

Superglue includes neither lavender nor clove but it smells, not quite pleasantly, like a combination of the two. It’s unmistakable. John has time to think how funny it is that just this once, his train of thought should be as fast as Sherlock’s, and then he feels sick to his stomach, and also as if he might faint.

The tech, looking worried, begins to apologize. Ms. Walthamstow, who grasps the implications only a moment after John himself has, says, “Oh, my God,” three times. John slides down the corridor wall and puts his head between his knees.

*

At A&E John gets an MRI, blood tests, tests of his ability to do simple magic. A child of three should be able to make a foam ball two centimeters in diameter hover in the air for seven seconds; a child of eight should be able to make the ball ricochet for at least two minutes between the walls of a testing chamber five meters by five meters. John can do neither of these things. The portions of the neocortex that should be lighting up on MRI when he performs a spell remain stubbornly dark. There is no detectable TKDT in his blood.

The thaumatology consultant says, gently, “Your cast of Tranquilium was flawless.”

John nods. “It’s — it was one of my better spells.” If he hadn’t managed to turn it on himself, Mrs. Walthamstow would likely have been migraine-free for months. _How well you used to cast Tranquilium is irrelevant now_.

“Mm,” says the consultant, in a tone of rue, and generously doesn’t say what John is thinking; perhaps she’s not even thinking it. “There are some studies going on, looking for ways to make exogenous TKDT cross the blood-brain barrier. We could enroll you . . . ”

“Yeah,” John says, “thanks, I’d appreciate that” — hearing his own voice muffled in his ears, himself flung as if in a fast current. _Nothing nothing nothing_ the current says: he cannot be a doctor without magic. He cannot be — what can he be? His mind flings up possibilities. _You can be a cleaner. It’s honest work._ He’ll hate it. Every second of it. _There are people who’ve had to do work like that every day of their lives,_ he tries to remind himself. He doesn’t care, even if it makes him an awful person, he doesn’t care: he’s not them, he’s _himself,_ he was a surgeon and then when he couldn’t be a surgeon anymore he retrained for general internal medicine and it wasn’t as exciting but he was good at it, he was _a good doctor,_ and he _rolled with the punches,_ but now — “Christ,” he says, “Christ, I’m going to be on the fucking dole for the rest of my fucking life.”

“I’m so sorry,” the thaumatologist says. Her expression is kind. John thinks he can see fear in it, too, or maybe that’s just his own fear reflected back at him.

*

When John gets home — no, when he gets _back_ — to Baker Street, he says nothing to Sherlock, only nods and heads straight to the bedroom ( _their_ bedroom, _the_ bedroom) to pack. Sherlock’s eyes went wide briefly when he saw John, so he knows, has deduced it that quickly, John thinks, or, perhaps worse yet, his extraordinary magic somehow enables him to overleap the need for chains of evidence and logic and just _perceive directly_ that his anyway-rather-dull lover is, in fact, now entirely and literally mundane; anyway, there’s no point in talking. But Sherlock follows him into the bedroom and leans against the wall just to the right of the doorway. The room’s one window faces east, so in this late afternoon the light is soft and indistinct; enough to pack by, though.

“You’re not going away for a bit; you’re leaving,” Sherlock says.

John tries to hear puzzlement, hurt, even a question in his tone; can’t. “Well, no use to you on cases, am I?” he replies. “Me with no magic. Figured I might as well get gone.”

“Cases,” Sherlock says — but now there is a rising inflection. _The question of your being useful on cases has never arisen, John,_ is what John hears, plain as the doorbell, or as the smell of Superglue. “Of course,” Sherlock says, and again: “Cases.” John steals a look; he’s not sure whether he can see the small vertical line between Sherlock’s brows, the little scrunch in his nose, or whether the light is insufficient and it’s only that John knows the expression is there. Sherlock frowning over a deduction. What is there for Sherlock to frown about here? The situation is perfectly clear to John, therefore there cannot possibly be any mystery to Sherlock.

John would like Sherlock to get the hell out of the bedroom while he finishes dismantling his life, but whether he asked or ordered or begged Sherlock to go, it wouldn’t matter: he would still be displaying a vulnerability he no longer wants this man to see. Shoes, pants, trousers, vests, shirts, socks. He had come out of the army with not much, and not much is what he still has: the cow skull, the Cluedo board, the books, the crockery are Sherlock’s. John closes up his suitcase and buckles his rucksack. He looks over the kitchen, just in case.

“The kettle’s yours.” Sherlock has followed him out of the bedroom; John didn’t even hear him move.

“I’ll get another.”

“Disability benefit is not munificent, John.”

“Fuck’s _sake_!” John brings his fist down on the kitchen table hard enough to make Sherlock’s microscope jump. “Do you think I don’t know that? I _will buy my own fucking kettle,_ you cold bastard, do you seriously think I want _one single fucking reminder_ of you?”

In John’s last memory of Baker Street, Sherlock has taken a step backward and brought his steepled fingers to his mouth, just as he does when he is thinking. John throws the flat door open and bangs down the stairs and out; from Sherlock, he hears not another word.

 

 


	2. Now That I Have Your Heart by Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John buys a couch at Oxfam and it is the thing he likes best in the flat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Louise Bogan's poem ["Song for the Last Act."](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48405)

John spends a few nights on Mike Stamford’s couch while he files the paperwork to register as magically disabled. The intake worker can’t conceal her dismay when she comes to the space on his Work Capability Assessment indicating what extent of magical ability the claimant has left; well, that’s all right, John thinks, since he can barely conceal his dismay either. _Zed point zed zed._ At her shocked glance, he stretches out his lips, approximating a smile or just showing his teeth in case she should choose to say something he doesn’t want to hear. He isn’t sure which, but in any case she claps her mouth shut, which suits John fine.

Central London is out of the question on his army pension plus housing allowance, but he gets a flat in East Ham — a one-bedroom, miraculously, and newly renovated, for a certain value of “renovated.” The kitchen counters are beige laminate. The floor has been redone in gleaming fake-wood laminate. The shower is fiberglass molded to look like tile. The walls are white. John buys a bed and a kitchen table at Ikea. The table comes with four chairs, which is ridiculous because John is never going to have three people over for supper. Or, probably, anyone over for breakfast.

. . . Sherlock would drink any amount of tea in the morning, with toast if it wasn’t one of the occasional days when he liked to annoy John by proclaiming — preposterously, and John had cleared away plenty of sandwich ends to prove it — that he never ate when on a case. His habits around tea were erratic: sometimes he brewed it properly, with loose leaves in a pot, but he was just as likely to drop a bag of PG Tips into a mug of boiling water and let it stew there while he drank. He never seemed to mind that by the time he got to the bottom of the mug, the tea had gone bitter and cold.

 _Ha, ha, it’s a metaphor,_ John thinks. Maybe he’ll bin the extra chairs.

He buys a couch at Oxfam and it is the thing he likes best in the flat, because it’s squashy and has a small stain on one arm that brought down the price and that also reminds him of people sitting on a couch eating and perhaps waving their arms about, communicatively, while watching telly. Not any particular people; just, people.

He situates his bed so that the morning sun will strike his face and thus irritate him enough to get him up and moving, because otherwise he would probably pass days lying on his back with his arms wrapped tight around himself, as if waiting to be embalmed.

The flat is clean. It is neat. It is functional. John is clean and neat and he used to be functional, too.

*

John forces himself to look for a job and, rather to his surprise, gets one: as an aide in a care home. “Bit of a bonus for us, your medical training,” says the administrator who hires him, which deserves a punch that John makes himself withhold because he has to earn money somehow and you don’t need magic to make beds and hand-feed demented persons. Clear-the-air would come in handy for diaper changes and the smell of sick old age in general, but John had got used to doing without in Afghanistan, where he usually couldn’t spare the time to cast it, and now he gets used to doing without again. The other aides are mostly middle-aged women; they’re warily polite at first, but warm up after a few weeks of watching him work as hard as they do, and sometimes, if they have a moment to spare, will cast for him — Toasty to keep a slow-eating patient’s food hot, say, or the blessed Clear-the-air _._ Once upon a time, John might have been the generous medical director, buying the staff lunch a couple of times a year. Now he’s the recipient of their generosity, and he’s grateful for it, and also embarrassed and ashamed at how he sometimes forgets himself — forgets that he’s not a doctor anymore, not the man in authority; that, in fact, the aides are good at what they do and more able than he will ever be.

The doctors who visit the care home residents, naturally, don’t quite see him at all.

*

The thaumatology consultant had, as promised, enrolled John in a first-phase clinical trial of a new means of delivering TKDT that, it’s hoped, will enable it to cross the blood–brain barrier. Every day he takes twenty milliliters of a tasteless pale-pink liquid that may or may not be a suspension of TKDT, and once a week he visits the neurothaumatology lab at UCLH, high in the glass-walled biomedical research tower, where he repeats the imaging and function tests done at A&E the day of his accident. Prince Charles probably hates the tower, but its structure, two shallow curves of wing separated by a central column, reminds John of the architecture of a human skeleton, as no doubt it’s supposed to do; he finds it elegant. Graceful, even.

The trial continues for three months. John tries to hope that he’s in the placebo arm, because the foam-ball tests make it clear that he’s had no return at all of magical function — if he’s getting TKDT, and if the TKDT is passing into his brain, it’s not accomplishing a thing when it gets there — but when the results are unblinded it turns out that what arm he was in doesn’t matter: the new delivery method has failed.

*

John tries to think of it like this: there was the time after the army and before Sherlock; he had been alone during those months. Then Sherlock cured his limp and, for a while, standing, eating, sleeping beside all that imperious beauty, John had felt whole and important again. He’d been wrong, it turned out, about the importance, but for as long as that feeling had lasted — as long as that silk cord had seemed to run between himself and Sherlock — it had been ...

... glory.

Then he had lost his magic and his work, but that loss was nothing to do with Sherlock. All right, in some corner of the multiverse where he and Sherlock had never met, other events too would have changed. Maybe he wouldn’t have stepped into that particular corridor at that particular moment. Maybe he’d still have his magic. But then, in that universe of No Sherlock, he’d still have the limp, as well. So he was better off for Sherlock; as long, of course, as you discounted the grief.

John used to want to accomplish things. He wanted to make hurt hurt less; he wanted to heal wounds, to make an impression, to change the course of events. He isn’t even angry at Sherlock anymore: you might as well shout at a cliff face and expect it to change. But, at home in the evenings, John is always aware that whichever room he is not occupying at the moment is empty. Maybe, he thinks, he should have looked for a bedsit after all.

*

One evening, John gets home from work, opens the door of his flat, and sees, on the table that came with three chairs too many, a padded shipping sleeve; it proves to contain a potions vial, and to have had lying under it an envelope. He sets down the vial, takes it up, sets it down again. His head is swimming with anger. The envelope is addressed to “Dr. John Watson,” in the architecturally neat hand in which Sherlock makes notes on his experiments. “‘Doctor,’” John says aloud, “you bastard,” and tears open the envelope.

The note inside bears no salutation.

_Drink this potion with 250ml of cold water (tap will serve). It will undo the effect of the Superglue._

It is signed _Sherlock Holmes,_ as if written to a stranger; as if it _needed_ to be signed, as if John might have had no idea who had picked the lock on his flat and come in without permission to —

_It will undo the effect of the Superglue._

John sits down, hard.

He can’t even look at the vial, or the note. He can hear his breathing, irregular and convulsive though his face is dry. He had thought he was all right, had thought he was getting used to this life ( _this_ half _-life_ ), but now hope has split him open.

Maybe Sherlock is just baiting him. He’ll take the potion, nothing will happen —

Or.

John puts his hands flat on the table and levers himself up. “Okay,” he says, aloud. He gets himself to the cabinet where he keeps his coffee mug and a couple of glasses, at which point he realizes that he hasn’t got a measuring cup and, if he knows Sherlock, that 250ml is important.

_If I know Sherlock._

“Okay,” he says again, and opens the cabinet anyway. There’s a 500ml graduated cylinder on the shelf next to his mug. Of course there is. “Why didn’t you just leave it on the table with the potion?” he asks the air. He was forever tidying up after Sherlock’s experiments, at ho—

At Baker Street.

He can hear himself: _Do you ever wash your own bloody glassware? I do eat at this table, you know._ Exasperated, but fond. In the time before he came to believe that Sherlock felt nothing. Tears prick. John runs the tap till the water’s as cold as it will go, measures exactly 250ml into the cylinder, and opens the vial of potion.

If it mattered whether the potion or the water came first, Sherlock would have said so in his note. John opts for potion first, in case it tastes bad.

It doesn’t. There’s an aftertaste something like cardamom; the cold water washes it away. John can’t remember another time when he was this frightened, unless it was the moment in Afghanistan, as he lay in the sand having given up, when he came to for a moment hearing medics’ voices: so he had something to lose again, after all.

He blows out air. He brought home with him a heat-to-eat supper: roast chicken, mashed potatoes, salad. He takes out the chicken and potatoes, places the salad to one side. No sound emerges when he tries to speak, so he clears his throat, tries again: he casts Toasty.

Absolutely nothing happens. “Christ,” he says.

Accidents with Superglue are unusual, but not rare, and they tend to be catastrophic; there are always research teams working on ways to reverse its effects. Triskaidekotonin itself is also the subject of intensive research, like the trial John’s thaumatologist got him enrolled in. A fair few experimental potions have gotten as far as clinical trials, and all have failed. It’s ridiculous to imagine that Sherlock Holmes, working alone, should in the space of five months have succeeded where experts, _specialists,_ people who’ve made molecular neurothaumatology _their life’s work,_ have failed.

But John does imagine it. He does.

TKDT reuptake inhibitors take effect in weeks, not minutes, he reminds himself. He puts the chicken and potatoes in a pan to heat on the stove, then forgets about them till he smells smoke, because all he can think is _When when when._

It can’t be _if._ It can’t.

He doesn’t, yet, think about the other question, of what he is meant to say to Sherlock, either now or once _when_ arrives. Or whether Sherlock will want him to say anything.

*

 _When_ arrives on the third day, which is to say that Sherlock somehow incorporated a TKDT-replenishing effect into the potion. John has forced himself not to try any spells in the meantime, but self-discipline isn’t the same thing as calm and he has been sleeping more poorly than usual. On that third morning, he walks into Mrs. Ellison’s room with her breakfast and finds her curled up and whimpering around the bleeding index finger of her right hand: a ragged cut that’s left a trail of blood back to the bedrail where there must be a bit of metal poking up. Poor Mrs. Ellison has reached a point of dementia at which she doesn’t speak or even understand words anymore, so there’s no soothing her by telling her that help is on the way. John casts Make-it-better before he remembers that he isn’t supposed to be able to cast anything.

Mrs. Ellison quiets the instant the pain fades; her face, which had been screwed up in animal misery, goes soft.

“Fucking hell,” John whispers, wide awake now, and gets on the intercom for a nurse to stitch the cut.

*

He passes off the effects of Make-it-better as those of a hug and a soothing voice, which he should have been providing anyway, as he would have done if not for his own arse-over-teakettle interior state. He feeds the rest of his assigned patients on automatic and doesn’t try any more spells: he isn’t ready to make medical history just yet — in imagining which it occurs to him, given Sherlock is capable of devising a counter to Superglue, he’s also capable of tailoring that counter precisely to John, like one of those individualized cancer-treatment potions based on a patient’s own DNA. “No,” Sherlock would say, frowning puzzled at some number of assembled scientists (tablets in hand; agog), “I didn’t make the counterpotion useful to patients in general; why should I have?”

It occurs to John, too, to wonder whether the reversal of Superglue is permanent. Not that that matters, really, because if he needs to take Sherlock’s potion in perpetuity, if his magicless state is like a chronic disease, then Sherlock will simply make more —

— and what, _what_ is John thinking? Where can it spring from, this bone certainty that what he needs, Sherlock will provide?

For that matter, why did he drink down the contents of that vial without hesitation?

 _He wasn’t going to murder you,_ John’s rational mind offers. _He left a signed note —_

— which he could presumably have slipped in again to remove, once whatever was in the vial had taken effect.

John had not for even a flicker of an instant questioned his faith that the potion in the vial was meant to help him. That even if Sherlock had failed, he would not harm.

Yet he remembers that cold, impassive face, signaling the indifference of Sherlock’s heart.

And then it's as if John's thoughts, taking step by step along a familiar path, miss their footing and he finds himself — his understanding — thrown into the air and spinning. He lands, torn, on one day, like poor Mrs. Ellison’s hand snagging on that sharp bit of metal: the day on Hampstead Heath when he began, in earnest, to give up on Sherlock.

The dead animate’s face had been contorted in terror and pain, but Sherlock had called her “it.” Of all those present at that scene, it was Sherlock, dropping his history lesson and his bored deductions, Sherlock empty of pity, who seemed least human.

Sherlock’s _history lesson_.

Sherlock, who didn't know, till John told him it was so, that the earth orbits the sun; Sherlock, who couldn't name the prime minister of the UK; Sherlock, who had never recognized a single pop song in the soundtrack of any program on the telly. Sherlock, who claimed no subject was of interest to him unless it had directly to do with solving crimes.

Sherlock was exceedingly well informed about the history of animates, although as far as anyone knew until the day Galatea was found, there had been no animate in England in nearly a hundred and fifty years.

*

John had stormed out of Baker Street with the key to the flat in the pocket of his trousers and — he recognizes the implication with some shame — never got round to mailing it back. But no matter that the key is a loophole he’s left himself, he’s forfeited the right to use it; so he rings the bell and then stands back where Sherlock can look out the kitchen window and see him. The window's open and the curtain, caught by a breeze, lifts and falls against the brick. Even from the pavement, John can see how Sherlock swallows hard at the sight of him. The reaction seems as reflexive as anyone else's startled pain. John's heart hurts at the sight. “To apologize,” he says to Sherlock in the window, answering the question Sherlock doesn't need to ask.

Sherlock's expression blanks, but he nods and rings John in.

*

John had not thought words would come easily, but he had thought they would come. Instead he finds himself just looking — at the flat, to begin with, because seeing it again brings him smack into the realization of how hard he’s been working, all this time, not to remember it — not to yearn for the comfortable press of the chair that had been his, for the exact angle of afternoon light from the street-side windows, for something as small and daily as the way the handle on the refrigerator door dug into his palm because the gasket magnet was strong and it took some effort to open the door.

But the spaces and textures of the flat are proxies for what John misses most. Sherlock has arranged himself in his leather chair, feet flat on the floor, hands folded together and resting on his right thigh; he’s looking at John with an expression of mild interest. The only aspect of his demeanor to convey that he might have a stake in whatever John may do or say is his utter stillness.

John says, “I don’t know which should come first, the apology or the thanks.”

Sherlock glances away. “An apology? — But why, if you feel it’s the correct course?”

This doesn’t quite seem to make sense, and the next thing Sherlock says, almost under his breath, is genuinely baffling: “How did I ever think I could pull this off?”

“What d’you . . . ?” John asks, dumbly, and now Sherlock turns to look at him again.

“This end was inevitable, John — since you’ve worked it out, you must see that. I’m not a human being but a product of illicit magic. My entire legal existence is based on documentation I myself forged, or else bought with money I stole from my — from Andreas Coburne, when I ran away. Even supposing I had enforceable rights, a nonexistent — being — can easily be made to vanish, and of course the scientific interest — ”

But John has finally caught up. “No, wait, I’m not apologizing for turning you in — not that I’ve got the first idea who I’d turn you in to anyway, but that’s — _no._ I’m apologizing for the way I treated you.”

They stare at each other. Another understanding bursts in on John. “Oh, Christ. I gave you such shit because you would never enroll in any of the migraine studies. I thought you were so selfish, not even willing to undergo an fMRI a couple of times a year, and you just thought you’d be carted off to a lab somewhere and never get out, didn’t you?”

Head-tilt of agreement. “It was impossible to know what imaging would disclose without undergoing imaging.”

“I misconstrued everything you said and did. Everything.”

“To be fair,” Sherlock replies, “I did my best to conceal my origins. — It became apparent some time ago that I am less than adept at enacting social norms, but surely intimate conversations are generally conducted with the parties seated? If the parties are no longer lovers, of course; I appreciate that were matters otherwise, various physical configurations would be considered appropriate.”

 _You’re the one who left,_ John reminds himself, blinking, trying not to cry out against the pain: there’s no malice, not even any anger, in Sherlock’s voice; “no longer lovers” merely states a fact which he, John, brought into existence with words, like the last spell someone with no magic left could cast. He sits down. Sherlock has invited him to.

“Speaking of which,” Sherlock continues, his manner one of patient curiosity, “I was never able to work out quite why you left. Even if you don’t wish to return, I would find it helpful. If you could see your way to elucidating . . . ?”

“Even if I don’t wish to return?” John repeats, incredulous. “Sherlock, why would you have me back?”

“I believe that the sensations I experience with respect to you resemble those humans call love, also loneliness,” Sherlock says, with the same courteous manner as before.

John grabs at the arms of his chair. Perhaps he hasn’t spoken the words “Oh, God” out loud, because Sherlock only frowns; _Can he tell I feel as if I’ve been dropped from a high building, I wonder,_ thinks John.

Sherlock says: “I thought perhaps the potion was such a gesture as might make that clear.” A pause. “Before you left . . . At the scene with Galatea, I saw at once, from your reaction in particular, that I had misstepped. It was because of the revulsion, you see, that all the histories take such care to mention. I thought it best to make plain how remote from myself I found her. I, human; _it,_ not human. Then I saw your face.

“But how could I rectify the error without compounding it by seeming insincere? And of course, I _am_ insincere. Every facial expression, every posture, every turn of phrase — they are all consciously learnt, with the aim of presenting myself as what I am not.”

“Did you know her?” John asks. How much pain is it possible to experience, simply as a result of hearing thoughtful words quietly spoken? He’s long past the _Real men don’t cry_ pounded into his boyhood and well into _Tears would be a relief so too bad I don’t deserve relief._

Sherlock shakes his head. “I saw the block of marble he planned to carve her from, and then, of course . . . ” He opens his hand to hold empty air. “But, John, you still haven’t said why you went. I thought for some time that it was on account of Galatea, because you’d worked out the truth of what I am, but it seems the revelation came to you more slowly than I surmised.” A false smile, and John is suddenly aware that he recognizes it: it’s the one meant to conceal uncertainty. “Additionally, I understood, of course, that you were in great distress over the loss of your magic, and I’m familiar with the phenomenon by which anger stands in, as it were, for grief and fear, but beyond that . . . I found your motivations opaque.” He looks down at his hands again.

The empty vial of counterpotion rests in the inner breast pocket of John’s donkey jacket. He hadn’t taken the jacket off when he sat down, since he had no idea how long he might be staying. It’s bunched up uncomfortably behind him, but he’s still unsure whether he can presume so far as to take it off and hang it up —

_Stop leaving._

Learn a language in childhood and you can speak it without conscious thought; but it doesn’t follow that someone who carefully and awkwardly speaks a second language, learnt for the purpose of communicating in the land to which he has immigrated or been exiled, is therefore lying. “I thought I was like a pet to you,” John makes himself say. “Or, not even a pet. A toy. And then the toy got broken.”

Sherlock is staring at him, mouth open. “But — ”

John puts up a hand. “No, let me — let me say this. I — First, I saw you practicing, facial expressions and so on, trying to learn, I guess, and I thought, I thought that meant you were just faking all the — the feelings that those expressions came with.

“That’s one. And then the other” — John has to force this out, because even now it is so humiliating to admit how terrible those nights were, to bring himself back so directly to what it felt like, looking at Sherlock with his own heart heavy with love and seeing no answer — “after we, we had sex, your face — sometimes it was totally blank. And I thought — I felt so alone. I’ve said it already, I know. But I thought you felt nothing, I thought those were the times I was seeing the truth.”

Sherlock says, “This doesn’t — ”

Another knowledge —

Sherlock says, “But — ”

— begins —

Sherlock says, “But the information — ”

—to —

Sherlock says, “But, but, but — ”

—unfurl —

Sherlock says, “John, I was studying _your face._ ”

_I —_

Sherlock says, “But you aver that you experienced strong emotions at those times.”

— _was the one —_

Sherlock says, “And everything I have learnt about human demeanor and behavior suggests that you are telling the truth.”

_— telling lies —_

Sherlock says, “But, if your facial immobility was a means of communicating strong emotion — ”

_— all along —_

Sherlock says, “ — why was mine — ”

— _and it was Sherlock —_

Sherlock says, “ — not?”

— _trying —_

Sherlock says, “I always felt everything, John. I thought I was showing you that. I felt everything.”

— _to tell the truth._

John covers his face, but the time for _covering your face_ for _hiding_ is gone, no, the time for hiding had never been. He takes his hands away and forces himself to meet Sherlock’s gaze, meets it with all the frightened, naked feeling he had been too cowardly to expose. _I adore you,_ he allows his expression to say, _I marvel at your brilliance; your touch confounds me; I have never seen eyes as beautiful as yours; every glimpse of your skin makes me want to set my mouth against it; if I heard your voice in the middle of a crowd in Trafalgar Square I would know, at once, exactly in which direction to turn to find you; you could destroy me with a word; I want to lie beside you all the nights of my life; please forgive me; I love you, I love you, I love you._

“Oh,” Sherlock says, only that. He gets up and crosses the small space of floor between his chair and John’s. John’s heart clamors; he stands up into Sherlock’s space, still looking at him, trying to send out toward Sherlock each grain and every atom of his wordless love, and as Sherlock studies his face John sees his own emotions mirrored there, fear desire admiration tenderness yearning delight, in sequence, in combination after combination, one blending into another until finally Sherlock has learnt all of them and they resolve into joy — and Sherlock, who from the first moment John saw him has been working magic that no one else can do, says, “Yes. Of course, yes,” and John kisses him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm participating in the Fandom Trumps Hate auction, for which bidding starts this Thursday, January 12.   
> [Here's the post](http://ancientreader.tumblr.com/post/155652079178/ancientreader-fth-contributor-page) describing what I'll offer. And please do check out the FAQ and auction page, linked on that post -- many awesome fanwork creators are in!


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